Mhlonishwa ngivumele ngibingelele iNdlu eHloniphekile. [Chairperson, allow me to greet this august House.]
Chairperson, it is an honour for me to participate in the debate on higher education today, under the theme Expanding Opportunities to Higher Education and Training for the Poor.
Fifty years ago in Kliptown the people of South Africa, The Congress of the People, from across the length and breadth of our country, gathered in order to lay the foundation of their vision of the new South Africa. It is there where South Africans said:
The doors of learning and culture shall be opened. Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children. Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit.
Adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan.
These freedoms we will fight for, side by side, throughout our lives, until we have won our liberty.
It is against this backdrop that the ANC-led government in this Fourth Parliament decided to make education an Apex Priority. Furthermore it decided to establish a new department which focuses on adult education and training, further education and training and higher education.
This was informed by the realisation that not much had been done in achieving people's education for people's power, due to the legacy of apartheid and Verwoerd's policy of education that we inherited in 1994.
Chairperson, allow me to take this House down memory lane. In 1954, Verwoerd, one of the main architects of the apartheid system, said that blacks ought not to be trained above certain forms of labour. In 1953, Hendrik Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs from 1950 to 1958, and later the Prime Minister from 1958 to 1966, piloted the Bantu Education Act through Parliament. This was designed to prepare blacks for an inferior place in society.
It was in this august House that he said that the new educational system "should have its roots in the spirit and being of a Bantu society" and "serve the respective ethnic communities".
He also said that it did not serve any purpose to teach a black child mathematics if he could not use it.
It is a fallacy for the critics and learned people to doubt the product of the new education system that we established 17 years ago, when the system had been entrenched for 40 years.
Hon Minister, access to FET colleges for the working class is still a challenge. We are trying to fix our education system in the manner that one would fix the tyre of a car while it is in motion. The introduction of the National Certificate: Vocational, NCV, has a great impact on access as it requires very few learners in a class and most potential learners do not gain access.
We are talking of 2,7 million young people who have lost hope, who have matriculated, who are unemployed and who lack skills. The introduction of the Skills Development Act and the Skills Development Levies Act were mechanisms of the ANC-led government to respond to this challenge. It is a fact that the working class and the poor have not benefited much from this project. Learnerships were established for the purpose of giving learners 70% workplace experience and 30% theoretical experience. However, the system ended up being a milking cow for the elite. The system became very bureaucratic and difficult and this limited access.
The National Skills Fund, the sector education and training authorities in South Africa, Setas, grants and the National Skills Development Strategy, NSDS3, have to help us to solve this problem.
The language used in skills development programmes has to be simplified and understood by all the intended beneficiaries - these are the youth, women, blacks and people with disabilities. There is a great need to refocus our education and training in vocational directions and to destigmatise it.
There is also a need to increase the infrastructure of FET colleges so that they can absorb more learners, as many working-class communities become victims of private providers and fly-by-night colleges.
There is a need to increase the pace of establishing community colleges so that adult education and training through FET colleges, community colleges, schools of skills and/or focused academies can increase access and create more opportunities. The "T" of training has to be promoted and applied as equally as the "E", which is education.
Minister, articulation is still a problem in our system. Take, for example, a learner who had passed Grade 12 and goes to an FET college. That learner will have to start at an N1 National Certificate level, which is equivalent to Grade 9. In fact, it actually means that the school curriculum is not articulated towards the vocational stream.
This also relates to the recognition of prior learning, in regard to which the SA Qualifications Authority, Saqa, has adopted a resolution. All the qualifications from any South African institution have a recognition of prior learning, RPL, component. However, workers and adults who are able to demonstrate a capacity to perform a certain skill cannot be accredited and certified as qualified persons. They have to be taken through cumbersome processes and procedures. At the end they have regrets and the whole process is a flop, and then they drop out. Hon Minister, this has to be looked into as RPL remains a compliance issue for the registration of a programme or a qualification by the providers.
The ruling party's manifesto talked of the reopening of colleges of education. This infrastructure that is deteriorating and is underutilised in other provinces, can also salvage this situation. Limpopo, for instance, is a rural province that has the following former teacher training colleges: Tivumbeni, Naomo, Setotolwane, Giyani, Hoxani, Modjadji, Mokopane, Dr C N Phatudi and others, that can be used fruitfully in order to skill the unemployed and create opportunities for a better life.
There are mining houses in Limpopo which mine platinum, the most expensive mineral in South Africa. There is a need for this department to open debates with the Department of Mineral Resources, so that, as part of their social responsibility, these mining houses contribute by issuing bursaries to communities in the field of engineering and other skills needed by the mining houses.
In Gauteng we are currently faced with a big challenge around acidic water drainage and access to water. We can only get experts who come from these communities if we channel our resources correctly, not just by building playgrounds as is currently being done by the mining houses.
Minister, his Excellency the President, in his address on 11 February 2011, announced that the focus of higher education will be to expand access, especially for the children of the poor. This includes the conversion of loans into bursaries for qualifying final year students.
The National Assembly has just passed the Higher Education Act Amendment Bill without effecting this important pronouncement. Chances are that the implementation of this pronouncement might be a challenge. Immediately after this debate the NCOP will issue a statement for concurrency purposes without effecting it.
Whilst we celebrate the matric results percentage increase and the increase of exemptions, institutions of higher learning continue placing learners in bridging courses for a year, and this puts a burden on the children of the poor and the learners who are from no-fee paying schools, as the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, NSFAS, loans and bursaries do not cover the bridging courses. This is a recipe for creating dropouts and closes the doors of learning. What it literally means is that a course that is supposed to take three years now becomes a four-year course. This then suggests that there have to be amendments.
Let me raise the case of the community of Msinga that we visited in October 2011. Msinga is a deep rural area with rich agriculture land. Coal has also been found there. The uThukela River runs close by.
However, after passing Grade 12, learners from Msinga roam around without going anywhere because there is no community college or FET college within the district. There is no access to loans and bursaries. Girls have babies and seek to get married as a means of survival.
Mhlonishwa ngivumele ngihlale phansi ngelithi, mayihlome impi yezikhali zemfundo ephakeme kubantu abampofu nabahluphekayo, abaseGiyani, eMuyexe, eTembisa, e-North West. Iyabonga inkosazana yaMazilankatha. Ngiyabonga. [Ihlombe.] (Translation of isiZulu paragraph follows.)
[Hon Chairperson, allow me to sit down as I say let the poor and the suffering arm themselves with higher education, those who are from Giyani, Muyexe, Tembisa and the North West. Thank you from me, Miss Mzilankatha. Thank you. [Applause.]]